The dog-gone long title of Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse – Episode 1: The Penal Zone will hop upon the internets for digital distribution on April 15. The first episode of the duo’s third season of freelance police work will be available on PC, Mac — and PS3, quelle surprise.
Pre-orders for the whole season on PC and Mac are currently available on Telltale’s site for $35, which also comes with an episode from Strong Bad, Wallace & Gromit or a previous Sam & Max season for free. “Pre-orders on PlayStation Network coming soon.”
Sam and Max penetrate ‘The Penal Zone’ April 15 on PC, Mac, PS3 originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg is thrilled with February’s NPD numbers, and for good reason. The Xbox 360 took the top spot in home console sales last month, despite not being a Wii. According to the NPD, it’s the first time this has happened since the Halo 3 launch in 2007.
BioShock 2 seems to have had something to do with the boost, with the Xbox 360 version topping the software charts (and the PS3 version absent from the top ten). Other notable software milestones: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is now the third best-selling game of all time, and Just Dance seems to have made a better pact with Satan than even Dante’s Inferno did. See the software top ten after the break.
-DS: 613K
191K (45%)
-360: 422K89K (27%)
-Wii: 398K
68K (-15%)
-PS3: 360K83K (30%)
-PSP: 133K33K (33%)
-PS2: 102K60K (143%)
Continue reading February NPD: Xbox 360 and BioShock 2 sales heat up
February NPD: Xbox 360 and BioShock 2 sales heat up originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Last year’s shockingly awesome superhero title inFamous boasted a massive sandbox world known as Empire City — a playground full of climbable, grindable, shootable objects. It was an impressive environment, made all the more impressive by a startling piece of information revealed by Sucker Punch’s Nate Fox during a recent GDC panel: The whole city was created by a team of just 12 artists.
Fox explained that this feat was accomplished with the liberal reusing of the game’s catalog of environmental assets. For example, there were only two types of cars in the game, differentiated by hue shifts and decals. The map was partitioned into a hexagonal grid — the inspiration for which came from the popular board game Carcassonne, Fox explained. Edges of each hex were designed to effortlessly fit together, allowing designers to make minor changes to each compartment, and paste the location into another chunk of the city.
This might sound like a cheap tactic for a developer to employ, but Fox explained that a developer’s time and resources are limited. By swiftly executing the creation of a game’s setting, the developers are given more of an opportunity to focus on designing “evil lairs” and other memorable landmarks. Oh, and according to Fox, the industry term for these outstanding structures is “Weenies.” Yes, for that reason. Yes, that is wonderful.
GDC 2010: How Sucker Punch built inFamous’ big city with a small team originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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If InstantAction.com’s CEO Lou Castle is to be believed, we’re apparently going to be playing games pretty much wherever we want in the not-so-distant future. He’s just revealed plans (via IndustryGamers) to relaunch his site with a new business/distribution model and a partnership with game streaming service Gaikai. In addition to the already existing model of a quick download (a claimed 4 – 5 minutes) that still somewhat relies on your computer power to process the game’s graphics, IA will now offer a streaming option for those who’d prefer a quicker, less hardware reliant gaming experience. “It’s the perfect implementation of a thin client solution because when it’s available it’s brilliant and when it’s not available it’s ok … you only have to wait a couple minutes.”
The aforementioned streaming option (employing Gaikai) will also be embedabble on the web, as demonstrated with Assassin’s Creed (not to mention to us earlier today) “Now if people are reading a review of a game, they don’t have to go find it … they can play it right then and there in the browser.”
And that’s just the beginning — Castle clearly has an eye on digital distribution services when he talks about employing Facebook as “InstantAction’s Xbox Live.” IA’s new distribution model essentially promises to developers/publishers the ability to release games with a variety of payment methods (pay as you go, free-to-play, one-time charge, etc.) while incorporating the aforementioned embed and streaming functionalities.
So far, the company has inked one deal for distribution (with LucasArts for The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition) and Castle claims to be pursuing others right now. And apparently it won’t be too long before we get to check out the new system ourselves, as the revamped digital platform is said to be “launching soon.”
Gaikai and InstantAction team up for streaming, embeddable games originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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At last night’s Indie Game Maker Rant, Tommy Refenes, one half of Team Meat, appropriately let off some steam about Apple’s App Store, saying, “The majority of people who do anything for the App Store work on it and then kind of get screwed over.” Refenes suggested that what the App Store specializes in are cheap ports of established brands, sold on their established names alone, as he compared it to the Tiger LCD handheld games of the late ’80s and early ’90s.
“It’s just a way to sell a brand,” Refenes said. “That’s what the Tiger handheld games were, and that’s what I think the App Store is.”
To prove a point that the App Store is “kind of shit for most things,” Refenes recounted the experiment he launched with
Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman. The two developed a “joke game” called
Zits & Giggles (in which players pop pimples) and submitted it to the App Store at the 99 cents price point. Each time sales dropped off, they raised the price. Consumers kept buying it, however, as the game rose to $15, then to $50, and so on — it was even purchased for $299!
We don’t know what to take away from that, but luckily Refenes had an observation: “My conclusion to all of this is that the people who you’re selling to on the App Store are not necessarily gamers.” Care to challenge that theory?
Zits & Giggles ($349.99): 
Super Meat Boy dude: ‘App Store is Tiger handheld of this generation’ originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Click to flash-ify
Unless you’re a journalist, analyst or developer, your odds of ever attending the Game Developers Conference are pretty slim. Feel free to live vicariously through the Joystiq crew by checking out the gallery below. No, it’s not nearly as flashy as E3 and PAX’s show floors — except in the case of the MotionCapture.com booth (pictured above), which is quite possibly the flashiest thing we’ve ever seen.
JPEGs from the frontlines of the GDC 2010 show floor originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Speaking during GDC, Peter Molyneux highlighted Lionhead’s strategy for Fable 3, specifically noting that a franchise will die if it fails to grow. “If we don’t grow as a franchise, If Fable doesn’t get bigger as a franchise,” said Molyneux, “then it will eventually die.” Lionhead is “very happy” with the success of Fable so far, with Molyneux stating that the original Fable sold “about 3 million” copies, while Fable 2 moved approximately 3.5 million.
He added that he hopes that 25-30 percent more people will play Fable 3, explaining Lionhead’s plans to craft Fable 3 as more of an action-adventure title — a genre which tends to perform better than RPGs. The overall goal for Lionhead is to sell more than five million copies of Fable 3. According to Molyneux, Fable 3 needs to sell that many in order to “be part of the big boys, the big blockbusters.”
How will Lionhead rope in that many new customers? Read our full coverage of the Fable 3 GDC panel to find out.
Fable 2 sold 3.5 million copies, Lionhead ‘needs’ 5 million for Fable 3 originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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It would appear that the still-unnamed next project in the Dragon Age series has been given a date, as spotted by 1UP in an early retail box of Dragon Age: Origins — Awakening for PS3. Aligning with the release window hinted at by EA hinted earlier this year during a financial call, the scarcely-detailed game will arrive on Februrary 1, 2011 — or, in the graphic’s terms, “02.01.2011.”
We’re not exactly sure if this is part of the two years of promised content that BioWare outlined late last year, but at very least it’s an extremely early (possible) release date for more content in a critically acclaimed series. We’ve asked EA for more information on the date and will let you know more as soon as we do.
Mystery Dragon Age project dated Feb. 1, 2011 originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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click to visit the new Albion
Peter Molyneux has made it clear that Fable 3 is ditching as much of the 2D interface from Fable 2 as possible. Speaking at GDC, he finally showed us exactly how Lionhead will achieve this. According to Molyneux, Microsoft user research revealed that a majority of Fable 3 players understood fewer than half of the features in the game. “We’re creating content that people literally don’t care about,” said Molyneux.
To help rectify this, Fable 3’s menu system is managed entirely from within the game world. When players pause the game, their character is instantly warped to a chamber with different rooms that serve different functions. Molyneux specifically demonstrated the dressing room, where players will change clothes. Molyneux contrasted the process with that of Fable 2, in which changing outfits was like “going in the morning and choosing index cards to choose what you wear.”
Continue reading Peter Molyneux explains Fable 3 menu, morphing systems
Peter Molyneux explains Fable 3 menu, morphing systems originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Yoshio Sakamoto has had a rather diverse career with Nintendo, having worked on games like Metroid, WarioWare and Tomodatchi Collection. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata asked the Metroid: Other M producer to speak at GDC to “explore the secret of creating games for such a dynamic range of titles.”
One of Sakamoto’s greatest inspirations seems to be film, noting directors Dario Argento, Luc Besson, John Woo and Brian de Palma as key figures. In particular, he found Argento’s “Deep Red” to have a profound impact. Argento’s manipulation of mood through music and timing is something he found moving; the use of foreshadowing helped transcend the film beyond other horror films.
Other M will take these various inspirations by becoming a “synthesis of everything I’ve learned,” Sakamoto told the audience. A new trailer screened for GDC attendees highlighted various cinematic moments in the upcoming Wii game, including a CG reimagination of Super Metroid’s climatic ending. Sakamoto pointed out the return of Metroid Fusion’s Adam, reminding the audience that foreshadowing will play a key role in creating suspense in the interquel. Considering the subsequent applause, it seems clear that Metroid fans approve of this new direction.
Nintendo’s Yoshio Sakamoto reveals Metroid: Other M’s cinematic inspirations originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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